Mitt Romney believes that taxes are a horrible thing, and that they should be cut despite any harm such a move may do to the federal budget, the common good, or the social safety net.

Given this fact, why are Mitt Romney and his fellow Republicans not cheering for those in the 47 percent who are not paying any federal taxes at all?

The answer has been hiding in plain sight: those people, the “takers” are coded as black and brown. The “us,” the “makers” are understood to be white.

Of course, this is a lie and a misrepresentation of reality (more whites are poor and on government assistance than any other group in America); nevertheless this fiction serves Romney’s campaign of overt and subtle racism against Obama quite well.

Romney’s narrative of “makers” and “takers” is rooted in the
Republican Party’s ability to put a black and brown face on poverty in America
by the use of what has come to be described as “the Southern Strategy.” Since
at least Richard Nixon, conservatives realized that by linking anti-poverty
programs to people of color that white support for these policies can be
undercut.

The irony is harsh: more white people are on welfare and Medicaid for
example; yet, white voters are driven by a fear of a black bogeyman or “illegal
immigrants” to make choices that are not in their immediate or long term
economic interests.

Mitt Romney signaled to this white victimhood strategy in
the same speech where he decreed that half of Americans are lazy parasites.
There he said that the United
States would be destroyed if Hispanics
followed the lead of African Americans and decided to join the Democratic Party
in mass. Romney’s claim is truly onerous because it suggests that the choice to
be a responsible and involved citizen is somehow toxic to the country’s civic
health.

Romney’s hypocrisy about cutting taxes for the richest
Americans while making sure that the poor, the elderly, and others “pay their
fair share” is also a function of his belief in a particularly extreme version
of libertarianism that is colored by the dystopian fantasies of the author Ayn
Rand.

In this world, society exists to serve the rich. The virtues
of the rich are demonstrated by the amount of wealth they can accrue. The
remainder of society consists of “surplus” people. Romney and his running mate
Paul Ryan have repeatedly suggested that the federal government is an evil to
be destroyed. As such, the social safety net should be eviscerated so that the
rich can be further subsidized, and their wealth and job creating abilities
“unleashed.”

The bizarre has yielded to the absurd, as the stuff of
poorly written speculative fiction is now the official economic policy of the
Republican Party and Mitt Romney.

We are left with an important question.

Why would poor, elderly, or working class conservatives back
a candidate who has utter contempt for people like them?

Part of their support can be explained by what psychologists
call “motivated reasoning.” This is a process where people find a way to
reconcile a prior decision with new and unsettling facts in order to find
cognitive and psychological peace.

History is instructive here as well. In colonial Virginia during the 17th
century, white indentured servants allied with black bondsmen in an uprising
called Bacon’s Rebellion. The color line had not yet hardened: class trumped
race. Both groups fought against the white planter class in an effort to secure
land and more rights. In this moment, white elites created “race” as we
understand it today.

After the rebellion was defeated, poor whites were given
guns, land, and eventually their freedom; blacks were made into a unique class
of people who could be bought and sold as human property.

Centuries ago, whiteness trumped shared class alliances
across the color line. In the year 2012, Republicans are still using
reactionary identity politics in order to mobilize the white working class
against their own economic interests.

For their efforts, poor whites in 17th Virginia received
tangible rewards in the form of land, and psychic rewards too, what was the
security that came from not being black and a slave in a society where such
markers of identity and color would mean “social death.”

Mitt Romney is gambling that the tens of millions of white
voters who he has insulted will vote for him because of racial tribalism and
hostility towards the country’s first black president. Unlike the planters
during Bacon’s Rebellion, Mitt Romney has nothing material to offer poor and
working class voters in the Republican Party. If anything, he is proposing
policies that would make their day to day lives much more difficult.

Are the psychic wages of whiteness enough? Will ginning up
white racial resentment against the country’s first black president create a
path to victory for Mitt Romney? We will find out in November.

Corey Robin describes in detail many of the reasons that lower-class people support conservatives: http://coreyrobin.com/2011/10/17/1157/

I think one important factor that you miss in this essay is the submerged state. Government programs that benefit whites are ignored like a fish ignores water. The Southern Strategy has come full circle, and the word "government" itself now implies "anything which benefits nonwhites." Thus the Right's drive to reduce "government" and make it as small as possible.

It appears that being White is simply not good enough to win in this in this country’s presidential election any longer. Those days are long gone and the race card being utilized as a tool to win is too weathered to be effective. Furthermore, if a rich White man like Romney is unable to beat this country’s first Black president during one of this country’s worst economic downturns, he should throw in his White flag and surrender his presidential efforts immediately!

Nevertheless it is a safe bet that the most of red areas on that map are heavily Republican.

[Turnout in 2008 was about what it was in 2004, and, according to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, the reason it wasn't higher—as widely expected, given the keen interest in this election—was that fewer Republicans went to the polls. The percentage of Democrats who went to the polls increased 2.6 percentage points while the percentage of Republicans went down 1.3 percentage points. The greatest favor the white race did Obama this year may have been to stay home.] -- T. Noah Nov. 10, 2008

Romney has to use all means at his disposal to get those white Republicans who stayed home in 2008to the polls. He has to hope for an erosion of Obama 2008 support, and maybe some of those dead white folks can vote as they used to do.

Of course one could also argue that with 25 percent plus real unemployment, increased poverty, declining incomes and a massive loss of wealth through foreclosures, Barack Obama’s only benefit to Afrikan American is psychological.

[Racism is an instinctive tool to capture resources and deny them to competitor "species." This is why Obama is backed by the Wall Street bankers. To them, he is a tool to safeguard their fortunes against the rising tide of public resentment. They are excellent psychologists, and psychic abusers of the popular Black mind. They know, through their experts in PR (advertising and the management of the public mind), how the popular Black mind pines for symbols of "hope," for action heroes on basketball courts and on the big screen... Any hero in any arena can be produced to distract and quell the masses, so long as it is not an actual hero in any arena of actual power.] -- Manuel Garcia, Jr.

And yet Barama's margin of lead in the polls is so minute. Romney is such an awful candidate and gaff-prone campaigner one wonders why Barama's lead over him is not much larger. I guess that's what happens when the choice is between the lesser of two awfuls. Come on Amerka. Make up your mind. Which of these two poisons do you want to take?

Tips and Support Are Always Welcome

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, Raw Story, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Raw Story, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, as well as online magazines and publications such as The Atlantic, Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.